What is Transjective?

When we, as precarious embodied beings, engage with things – when we do things – we meet a creative relational reality as neither objective nor subjective. Reality is neither fully separate from us (objective – simply “out there”)) Nor is it reducible to us (subjective – our illusions, imaginations, or “best guesses”). Instead, because of how we are actively of an environment relationally, it shows up (really simply exists) with relational but very real qualities. And these real relational qualities are better understood as what Veraeke and Mastropietro term “transjective”.

“What is relevant to an organism in its environment is never an entirely subjective or objective feature. Instead, it is transjective, arising through the interaction of the agent with the world. In other words, the organism enacts, and thereby brings forth, its own world of meaning and value.” (Jaeger et al)

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What is an Example of Transjective?

A simple example: To a person jumping into a swimming pool on a summer day, they are met by a liquid that surrounds their body, slowing them down and ultimately suspending them in the water buoyantly. But to a small water skimming insect – a Water Strider, it is not experiencing that very same water as a liquid that they float or sink in whatsoever, but rather as a tensile surface they can skim across as they are stuck to it electrostatically. Then, changing scale again – to a paramecium, the very same water that is a very thin fluid to us – is quite a thick, syrupy substance. And to a single-cell bacterium, this very same “water” is experienced as something that is not a liquid at all – they are bounced around by molecules.

The reality of our experiences profoundly shifts relationally as well: if we as embodied humans now decide to dive into that same pool of water from a very great height, nothing about the objective physical properties of the water will change, but when our diving body now meets the water, it will not part around our body and gently slow it down. The transjective experience will be one of hitting a very hard, solid object that will crush our bones and organs, no differently than hitting a concrete sidewalk from a great height.

In all these cases, it is the same “objective” physical thing, “water” – but the very real and consequential experiences are wholly qualitatively transjectively different. Another way of saying this is that given the relational organization of our practices, bodies, tools, and environments, reality will show up in ways that afford us very different real experiential possibilities (see Affordances).

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How is Understanding Transjective Helpful to a Creative Practice?

Additionally, what is relevant about our embodied selves, our practices, tools, and environments will radically shift. Importantly, especially from the perspective of creativity, we – like all living beings – live in a dynamic, concretely real co-created transjective world. We do not experientially ever meet an “objective” world – nor is our subjectivity ever separate from this transjective reality (see World-Making).

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See also: Affordance, Organization, Relevance Creation, World-Making, Assemblage, Emergence, Bio-Encluturated